Category: Teen Comedy

(A quick note before I write this review. I think [emphasis on think] that I watched this movie on Monday evening. I was going to review it when I came to work on Tuesday but I forgot to bring my laptop that day and I’ve been on the road since then because of an Arcade Fire concert in Pittsburgh Wednesday and then a Paul Simon/Sting concert in DC on Wednesday. So I ap0logize in advance for the possible weakened state of this review)

Towards the beginning of Heathers, Winona Ryder’s somewhat morally centered Veronica voices her hesitancy to one of the cruel pranks of the powerful Heather clique, and Queen Bee Heather Chandler drops one of the film’s many great throwaway lines, “Well, fuck me gently with a chainsaw.” While I’m glad such absurd aphorisms would no longer sound natural in today’s world, language in the 1980s had character. That character was often garish and patently over-the-top, but it rarely felt dispensable or throw-away. 1984’s Sixteen Candles has not aged particularly well and it plays hop-scotch with being downright offensive at times, but it has more character and memorable style than any modern teen film that isn’t The Perks of Being a Wallflower.

This viewing of Sixteen Candles was my first since high school (when I was a vocal member of the church of John Hughes. For what it’s worth, I still think that Pretty in Pink is his best film), and after years of catching glimpses of the watered-down broadcast for TV version, I had forgotten how dark and raunchy elements of Sixteen Candles actually are. The film predates the PG-13 rating system, so this is likely one of the few PG films you’ll ever see with bare breasts, the word “fuck,” and more cursing and casual date rape jokes than you can throw a stick at.

The actual plot of Sixteen Candles is about as simple (and well-trod these days) as it gets. Wallflower high schooler Samantha Baker (Molly Ringwald) is turning sixteen the day before her beautiful (and brainless) sister’s wedding, and in the chaos surrounding her sister’s wedding, including visiting grandparents and their insane Chinese exchange student, Sammie’s family forgets her birthday. To make matters worse for Sammie, she’s in love with gorgeous senior Jake Ryan (Mermaids‘ Michael Schoeffling), but she doesn’t think he knows that she exists, and all the while, a far too horny and overbearing nerd (Anthony Michael Hall) keeps trying to win Sammie’s heart for himself.

As I said, the plot of Sixteen Candles is simple to a fault, and it’s been done a million times since, and time hasn’t been kind to one of the original high school romantic comedies. Everything involving Long Duk Dong (Gedde Watanabe) is so racist and insensitive that it’s a wonder this movie was made by a major studio. He’s such a collection of awful Asian stereotypes (can’t drive, can’t speak English, yells “Bonsai” when dropping out of a tree despite being Chinese not Japanese) that I spent whole portions of the film cringing. Although to Gedde Watanabe’s credit, he rolls with the part and sells it for as many low-brow laughs as he can get.

Jake Ryan is arguably the Ur-“Dreamy High School Crush” archetype, but I never realized prior to this viewing how much of a sociopath he actually is. Let’s put this into perspective: Jake Ryan’s fragile ego is stroked by a shy girl who constantly looks at him but he knows nothing about her. He only barely knows her name. So, he decides to go on an epic quest to meet this girl despite the fact that he has a gorgeous girlfriend. He abandons said girlfriend who is completely shitfaced, black-out drunk to try and call Sammie and meet her. And then, he abandons his girlfriend to the clutches of the horny nerd and tells her that the nerd is him, and then Jake makes a joke about how the girlfriend is so drunk he could “violate her ten different ways.” He’s a terrible person.

Despite those huge complaints, there’s a sincerity in Sixteen Candles lacking in the majority of modern teen comedies. When Sammie stares at herself in the mirror when she wakes up on her birthday and bemoans the size of her bust, that’s something many high school girls have had to deal with. When Sammie wallows in her seemingly unrequited crush on Jake Ryan (despite the fact that the two barely know each other), it feels real because everyone who was ever in high school has been there. And when she talks to her father, we recognize the real awkwardness of parents and children talking about romance.

And, most importantly of all, Sixteen Candles is legitimately funny. Anthony Michael Hall’s Farmer Ted/The Geek is the film’s unsung comic hero, and he and his friends (including a young and already charming enough to be a star John Cusack) provide many of the film’s best moments. Farmer Ted and his crew crash a senior party and not long after arriving, Ted leans against a beer can sculpture and knocks it over earning the ire of the jocks. And the payoff comes later as Farmer Ted’s friends are being driven home in the trunk of the jocks’ car, and they’re both convinced that they’ve made new friends. And the film has plenty of great little bits like that.

Sixteen Candles is an 80s classic, but that doesn’t mean it’s a great film. And there are times where it’s outright bad (Jake Ryan is legitimately one of the most loathsome romantic leads in any rom-com ever), but with a subversive streak a mile wide and an honest ear for certain elements of teenage life, Sixteen Candles‘ shelf life is sure to last for years and years to come. One can only hope that future generations who discover this film move on to Hughes better features, The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink as well.

Since American Pie took over the box office in 1999, mainstream American teen comedies run on sex and raunch and little else. I’m not arguing that’s a huge problem. Raunchy teen sex comedies like Sex Drive are something of a guilty pleasure of mine, but I miss the day when teen comedies dared to be darker and more subversive (the closest we’ve come of late is the far more dramatic Perks of Being a Wallflower). And in today’s age of market-tested audiences and butter knife sharp satire, I can’t imagine a scenario where a teen comedy as pitch-black and razor sharp as Heathers could ever be made.

Cause let’s face it; if a studio head heard a pitch today about a comedy where a girl starts dating a psychopath and stages the murder of all of the popular kids at her high school, he would laugh the writer out of the conference room.But, somehow writer Daniel Waters and director Michael Lehman make all that and more work in their scathing satire of teen status, bullying, and the hell of growing up in the modern world (even if this movie’s complete 80s-ness dates the hell out of it).

The obvious spiritual predecessor to the modern (and less edgy) Mean Girls, Heathers charts the trials of Veronica Sawyer (Reality Bites‘s Winona Ryder), a bright and halfway decent girl that’s been sucked into the orbit of the popular “Heathers” clique at her school, where three beautiful and incredibly bitchy girls named Heather rule the school with Heather Chandler (Kim Walker) currently running the roost. They get their kicks from brutalizing the rest of the school and employ Veronica’s masterful handwriting mimicry skills to trick overweight losers into thinking jocks have written them sexually graphic love letters.

And Veronica’s life is upended with the arrival at Westerberg High of J.D. (Christian Slater), a mysterious loner who pulls a gun filled with blanks on two of the high school’s jock bullies on his first day of school. The roguish and mercurial J.D. is a breath of sincere, genuine air in Victoria’s artificial, plasticine existence. And though the pair get off on an immediate wave of young love, Veronica’s plans to prank the evil Heather Chandler spins out of control into murder when J.D. puts liquid drainer in her morning drink. And when Victoria agrees to write Heather’s suicide note, it sparks a string of murder-suicides that are beyond Veronica’s ability to control.

No one is spared from the barbed tongue that is Heathers‘ delicious wit. Although the film is clearly a condemnation of the clique-ish bully culture that has dominated American high schools for so long (I was fortunate to grow up in one of the few high schools in the country to legitimately not have a clique problem), it also spares no sympathy for those that think J.D.’s solution to the problem is the right one and paints them as the psychopaths they clearly are (even if their psychopathy is more sincere than the bullies’ sociopathy). But the movie’s harshest criticism are at the adult world’s attempts to commercialize and aestheticize the suffering and suicide of the young.

Like it’s bomb-throwing anti-hero, Heathers takes no prisoners and doesn’t know when to stop. When it’s on point, exploring the seemingly bottomless depths of cruelty that high schoolers commit on one another or the way that hippie-dippie adults exploit youth culture to its own means, Heathers is one of the most insightful and piercing films of the 80s. But, when it comes to the actions of J.D. and Veronica, Heathers isn’t quite as apt at handling the balancing act of showing us why Veronica would fall under J.D.’s homicidal spell but also why the film thinks he’s stark raving mad (and that Veronica has her guilt for the role she played in all of these proceedings).

I’ve often wondered why Winona Ryder never had a bigger career. In countless films in the 80s and early 90s, she was the perfect incarnation of rebellious teenage/young adult angst, and she had a presence and “I don’t give a fuck” attitude that is sorely missing in today’s many homogenous and easily replaceable starlets. It could be her kleptomania but I suspect there’s more there. Regardless, Heathers is one of her most iconic roles, and when Veronica says she wants her friends dead (but doesn’t really), Winona captures all of the complexity of teenage rage.

Christian Slater’s performance is just one cocaine-tinged Jack Nicholson impersonation, but it’s one hell of a Jack Nicholson impersonation. There is no other character in the American cinematic canon quite like Slater’s homicidal and increasingly deranged J.D. To this day, my sister is creeped out by any (even later) Slater roles because he so thoroughly embodies the nihilistic rage and desperation of J.D. J.D. might not be the most fully realized comedy in a satire chock full of caricature (excepting perhaps Veronica), but Slater’s psychotic turn can’t be missed.

The film is overflowing with memorable throwaway dialogue and to this day, I’ll yell out “I love my dead gay son!” for seemingly no reason other than the fact that I laugh my ass off every time it’s uttered in this film. Without question, elements of the film’s quintessentially 80s dialogue and fashion have dated it to its severe detriment. The film’s consistent usage of the word “very” as some synonym for “excellent” or “good” began to grate. But, they don’t make comedies like Heathers anymore, and for fans of satire that isn’t afraid to get its hands dirty, it’s still worth a watch 25 years later (sweet Jesus, I was born in 1989. Christ, I’m getting old).

Afterthe Steven Soderbergh disaster known as Bubble back at the beginning of September, I was hoping that it would be a while before I was forced to watch another complete trainwreck of a movie. Apparently, the blog gods hate me more than I suspected (after a surprisingly strong go around for my current 50 film block). Because 1989’s Shag is a strong contender to be the most unintentionally abrasive and tedious films that I’ve ever forced myself to sit through for this blog. Recently earmarked by Buzzfeed as a film from the 80s that all kids should see, let’s just say that I disagree heartily with that assessment. With absolutely reprehensible behavior rewarded in both its male and female characters, Shag is a loathsome moral lesson that indulges in the worst kinds of casual misogyny despite being a buddy comedy for women.

I sat through the kitschy schlock known as Forrest Gump,The Help, and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close without letting my attention wander too greatly. Despite my immense dislike for those films, I sat through their entirety while giving them my total attention. But, like How to Marry a Millionaire, it took around an hour or so before I realized I had devoted all the mental energy that I possibly could. And even though it seemed like maybe the movie was finally finding something resembling direction or meaning for it’s last thirty minutes, the damage done by the film’s first two-thirds was irreparable and Shag had lost its ability to make me care. That’s a tried and true axiom of film-making. If you can’t grab your audience in the first ten minutes, you’ve lost. Shag failed to make any positive impact whatsoever for the first hour and was mostly insufferably bad.

In the summer of 1963, four Southern Belle best friends straight out of high school, straight-laced Luanne (Page Hannah), wild child Melaina (Bridget Fonda), self-conscious Pudge (Annabeth Gish), and engaged Carson (Phoebe Cates), whisk themselves away for one last weekend of fun before they become adults once and for all. Luanne and Pudge are off to college, Carson is set to marry the dull Harley (Tyrone Power Jr.), and Melaina wants to pursue a career in Hollywood. And, so the girls head off to Myrtle Beach to spend time together one last time, meet boys, and have the last hurrah of youth. And at Myrtle Beach, they meet Buzz (Robert Rusler) and Chip (Scott Coffey) who begin to woo the engaged and hesitant Carson and the overly shy Pudge respectively. And, the whole time, you wish you were enjoying this movie 1% as much as these girls were enjoying their beach weekend.

I made the joke on twitter last night that Shag was the kind of thing the U.S. government might show to prisoners of war in order to get them to divulge military secrets, and while the movie may not actually qualify as torture, I’m probably going to regret the 98 minutes I lost to this movie for the rest of my life. There were three aspects of this film that weren’t utter failures. The soundtrack is actually really spectacular with lots of great early 60s/late 50s numbers and classic beach tunes. The soundtrack was easily the best part. Also, it featured Bridget Fonda at the peak of her undeniable attractiveness (she was even better looking than her aunt Jane in Jane Fonda’s heyday). And, Annabeth Gish (related to silent film darling Lillian Gish) was adequately relatable as the insecure Pudge.

Everything else about the film was an abject failure. From its focus on absurdly self-involved Southerners (an aesthetic that is sure to drive me away) to its total misunderstanding of how bohemians actually acted (apparently, in Shag, they’re just cut-out copies of Rizzo from Grease) that it’s alright for a man to more or less sexually harass a girl until she falls for him, everything about the first hour or so of Shag drove me absolutely nuts. And, even if it looked like the final act was making things better, it wasn’t enough for me to suddenly start caring about this film. Roger Ebert gave this movie three stars out of four, and I have no idea what crack pipe the otherwise esteemed critic was smoking because this movie is bad, and unless you long for this fantasy world presented in this film, I can’t imagine any reason to ever watch it.

For better and for worse, the resurgence of the teen sex farce genre of cinema (after it faded back into obscurity in the late 1980s) can be traced back to one movie, 1999’s American Pie. Now considered one of the definitive mainstream comedies of the late 90s, it was difficult to know just how influential (once again, for better and for worse) this movie would be. Fourteen years later, knowing everything that’s come after, it’s impossible not to see the blueprint left behind by this flawed but still deeply enjoyable film. In an experiment in comedy storytelling that few have tried to match, we’ve seen these characters grow now for fourteen years, and this was our first piece of the pie.

What makes American Pie work (when its jokes, acting, and occasional casual misogyny threaten to tear the film apart) so well compared to many of its peers is the emphasis the film put on character in addition to its endless scattershot gags. No one would ever confuse American Pie screenwriter Adam Herz with Kenneth Lonergan, but unlike many of the more gag-driven teen comedies to come, the boys and girls living in this world feel relatable. Their concerns are bigger than just having sex, and though the film falters on more than one occasion (consistent humor only comes from a handful of characters), American Pie has aged better than the careers of most of its stars.

With only a month left of high school, four best friends are desperate to lose their virginity. Socially awkward Jim (Jason Biggs) is more likely to be caught masturbating by his parents than to get any real action, although the cute Czechoslovakian foreign exchange student Nadia (Elizabeth Shannon) seems to have eyes for him. Kevin (Thomas Ian Nicholas) has a steady girlfriend, Vicky (Tara Reid), but they can’t seem to make it past third base, and with college on the way and both lovers heading to separate schools, Kevin knows that he doesn’t have very long to seal the deal. Oz (Chris Klein) wants to move past his reputation as a dumb jock and to work on his sensitivity, he joins the school jazz choir where he meets the cute Heather (Mena Suvari). And lastly, the want-to-be sophisticate Finch (Eddie Kaye Thomas) has to figure out a way to fit in with his intellectual and cultural inferiors.

After an embarrassing evening at the house party of the obnoxious and crass Steve Stifler (Sean William Scott), the four make a vow to lose their virginity by graduation. And of course, it’s easier said than done. Realizing prom is their last shot, each boy concocts a scheme to bed the girl of his choosing by that fateful night, but they find themselves in awkward sexual and personal mishaps along the way. Jim tries to have sex with a warm apple pie, Stifler drinks a beer with a special ingredient, Kevin learns the finer works of performing oral sex on a woman, and Oz realizes that becoming the sensitive guy will be a lot harder than just joining jazz choir.

It’s not Shakespeare. It’s not even Judd Apatow, but American Pie is an uproariously funny movie when all of the pieces fit together. As the series learned by the sequels (and I honestly believe American Wedding is the best film in the bunch), Jason Biggs’s Jim is the emotional heart of the franchise, and the most consistently funny moments in the film (i.e. the parts where I was laughing so hard I woke my sister up from a nap multiple times) are being Jim and his father (Eugene Levy). In one of the most hysterically realistic portrayals of father/son sex talks in the history of cinema, Jim’s dad tries to teach Jim on the finer points of condoms, pornography, masturbation, and sex, and they made me laugh so hard I started crying.

The rest of the movie’s humor doesn’t always work as well (though other characters have their moments that work too). The franchise’s love of scatalogical humor begins with Finch’s inability to use the bathroom in a public place, and it climaxes in one of the movie’s grosser and more overtly unfunny moments. Kevin gets in on the humor when he goes down on his girlfriend which climaxes (in more ways than one) with a most appropriate and gut-busting play on words. And, Vicky’s friend Jessica (Natasha Lyonne) provides a feminist counterpoint to the mostly male-dominated humor of the film (and who can forget Alyson Hanigan’s classic quip at film’s end)

I’ve always been bothered by the fact that the film never really addresses (unless American Reunion does which I’ve not seen yet) how wrong it was of Jim to videotape a naked Nadia and broadcast over the internet (even just to his close friends, ignoring that it was sent to everyone at their school), and the films’ casual misogyny is present in other places. Kevin is supposed to be the likeable guy in the group, but he treats Vicky like shit most of the film with little real consequence. Finch seems to be the only member of the group whose dishonesty and mistreatment of women gets any real comeuppance (and it mostly has to do with pissing off Stifler, not how he lied to women).

Also, sadly, there’s a reason that outside of these films, most of the cast never really had careers later on. Jason Biggs, Eugene Levy, Alyson Hannigan, Natasha Lyonne, and Thomas Ian Nicholas hit all of the right notes, but many of the other performances fall flat. Chris Klein is an actively bad actor. His performance during the film made me uncomfortable because of how stilted and wooden it is. And, his partner Mena Suvari, who is otherwise a serviceable actress, takes her cues from Klein and is as stilted and wooden as he is. Tara Reid is also a criminally awful actress, and the American Pie films were probably the last role of note she ever had.

I can’t believe I just wrote 1000 words on American Pie, but as a film that was very much a big part of my adolescence, it’s an important movie to me. I do not think American Pie is a great comedy. But it’s a very good one despite it’s consistent missteps. It’s get a lot more right than it does wrong, and when it finds the voice that works best for it, it’s a hilarious look into those years as a teenager where sex dominated your mind more than anything else. If you’ve somehow not seen American Pie and you can enjoy it’s very raunchy sense of humor (and it helped launch raunchy comedies back into prominence), take a trip with Jim and his friends.

A lot of really talented directors/writers have a hard time finding a balance between endearingly quirky and artificially eccentric. As much as I love Wes Anderson films, it often feels like Anderson is trying too hard to make his characters seem original by making them insufferably and unrealistically off-beat. Sometimes it works, Rushmore; sometimes it doesn’t, Moonrise Kingdom (though that film has its brilliant moments as well). Juno suffered from the same problem because as realistic as Juno’s problems are, there are no actual teenage girls that talked like her. At least, there weren’t until that film came out and inspired girls to speak like Ellen Page. Jared Hess’s breakout directorial debut, Napoleon Dynamite, has become a bit of a modern cult classic, but I have always found it to be so bad that it’s nearly unwatchable and that Hess’s characters are almost all artificially eccentric and not in the slightest endearingly quirky.

Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder) is a mouth-breathing, chronic-lying nerd with a penchant for drawing pencil doodles of fictional creatures. He lives at home with his grandmother and his 32-year old, effeminate brother Kip (Aaron Ruell). Kip spends his day chatting on line with his internet girlfriend Lafanda, whose reality is a legitimate question for most of the film. Napoleon gets bullied at school and his only two friends are transfer student Pedro (Efren Ramirez) and shy Deb (Big Love‘s Tina Majorino). When Napoleon’s grandmother is in a dune buggy accident, his creepy uncle Rico (Jon Gries) is sent to look after him and Kip. Rico longs for his glory days on the football field in high school (although the film implies that he was only a backup quarterback), and his endless schemes to make money and glory only serve to nearly ruin Napoleon’s life at every turn.

Jon Heder gives arguably one of the worst lead performances thus far for this blog. I could go back and look at every single movie I’ve reviewed (I probably won’t), but I imagine I would be hard-pressed to find a more unbelievable and grating performance than his. Anyone who’s seen Gentleman Broncos knows that subtlety isn’t the strong suit of any part of any Jared Hess film, and he was unable to coax a life-like performance from the wooden and slack-jawed Jon Heder. No one on this actual planet talks like Napoleon. You consistently feel like you’re watching a performance in a student film where they’re trying to give an example of how to be as awful as humanly possible in a performance. And the actors playing Kip and Pedro are not remotely any better.

The only two performances in the film that make the acting in the movie bearable are Tina Majorino as Deb and Jon Gries as Uncle Rico. I remember when I first watched this film that I thought Tina Majorino gave the worst performance of the whole movie. Now, I can easily say it was the best. Whereas Jon Heder, Efren Ramirez, and Aaron Ruell turn awkwardness into camp and stiff artificiality, Tina Majorino makes Deb seem like the shy but sensitive girl we all knew in high school. She just dives right into the part and doesn’t hold back. In fact, had the film been about Deb, it might have actually been a decent film. And Jon Gries becomes one of the only consistent sources of humor in the film as Uncle Rico. He’s the only actor with a real sense of comic timing, and he finds the creepiness and despair that both lie at the heart of Rico.

I’ll keep this review short because I simply don’t like this movie, and nothing I can say about it will persuade its legions of fans that it’s unwatchable drivel. Let me then close with this. Some films are so bad that they’re brilliant. Rocky Horror PictureShow is objectively an awful movie, but the fun and camp at it’s heart makes it a bizarre classic. Jared Hess tries to make a film that is so bad it’s great with Napoleon Dynamite, but instead, the movie remains almost entirely so bad that it’s a trainwreck. The film has its moments that made me laugh but I could count them on one hand, and the one truly great sequence (Napoleon’s final dance number) isn’t enough to make up for an hour and a half of a film that is too painfully awkward to watch and not in that good Freaks and Geeks type of way.

Well, after a three week hiatus, I am finally back on the blogging train. I made a promise to myself that I would continue on with this blog and not quit it like I have most of my other ventures, so after a break from burning myself out from watching so many movies in such a short period of time, I have returned (also three weeks is a ridiculously long time to keep DVD’s from Netflix). The movie that marks my return was neither great nor as bad as I thought it would be, and at times turned out to be an enjoyable dramedy with some serious pacing and mood whiplash issues. I am referring to 1990’s Mermaids starring the always fabulous Cher, Winona Ryder fresh off the success of Heathers, the under-appreciated Bob Hoskins, and an extremely young Christina Ricci.

First things first. Mermaids is not about actual mermaids. It tells the story of the Flax family, led by single mother Mrs. Flax (Cher), who is never given a first name and is often referred to by said title by her daughter Charlotte (Winona Ryder). The family is rounded out by the youngest daughter Kate (Christina Ricci). The Flax family moves often because whenever a relationship fails or there is any trouble in their lives, Mrs. Flax simply moves the family somewhere else by closing her eyes and pointing at a spot on the map. The film takes place in the 1960’s, and Mrs. Flax is no June Cleaver, let’s put it that way. She sleeps with men on the first date, she smokes, she curses. She’s pretty much Cher playing herself. The family is ethnically Jewish but despite this, Charlotte is obsessed with Catholicism and wants to be a nun when she gets older. Kate is a fantastic swimmer. The film begins with the family moving to a new town in Massachusetts and the conflict of the film arises from Charlotte falling in love with the caretaker of the local convent (who looks like the unholy love child of Matt Dillon and Billy Crudup) and Mrs. Flax beginning to date a local businessman (Bob Hoskins), and the natural clash of personalities between mother and daughter.

When the movie first started, I thought I was in for a quirky family comedy. I did not expect this film to be as dramatic as it was. The further and further the film goes along, it tries less and less to be humorous and more and more to explore the dynamic of this rather complicated family. Thank Christ that Winona Ryder was such a fantastic actress when she was younger. I honestly can’t think of a female actress who was able to embody teenage angst as well as her until Linda Cardellini came along for Freaks and Geeks a decade later. Maybe that’s why her career disappeared after she grew up. But in this film and in Heathers, she really plays the emotional turbulence of being a teenager just spot on. Her inner monologues are always fantastically delivered. And Cher is a surprisingly good actress as well. Now, maybe, I don’t have to be so skeptical of her Oscar win for Moonstruck. However, the movie’s constant shift in tone and emotion can be really disconcerting. It’s not that individual scenes fail (except for the emotionally overwraught scenes after Kennedy’s assassination); it’s just that they don’t all work very well together. Although that’s kind of what being a teenager is like, but I really doubt that was intentional.

Well, this movie left me conflicted. I thought Winona Ryder was absolutely fantastic and definitely deserved the Golden Globe nomination she received for the film, and Cher and Bob Hoskins were both great as well. And certain parts of the story worked really well for me. However, it was so all over the place in tone and mood that I could never really get comfortable with the film, and certain parts were just too ridiculous. If you love Cher (as I do. I don’t care that she’s like 70; she’s still gorgeous) or Winona Ryder, you should check it out for nostalgia’s sake. But don’t expect too much.